Windows in the beginning

I remember that box of Windows version nothing. It had a picture of a CGA monitor with four apps arranged on it. What a farce. Back then windows was basically a joke. The world never really tried to incorporate it until it reached version 3.0. Then version 3.1 really took off.

I would help people with their home machines by taking over a stack of floppies and get back home before 11pm. When Windows 95 came out, I stopped helping others because everything took much longer.

If I continued helping those people I would have had to take over a stack of CDs and a sleeping bag. Nowadays I don't help anyone. With a car, you can change the spark plugs and guarantee it will run better. Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, & XP don't respond to troubleshooting attempts like that.

Often you just have to format the hard drive and start over. That method is only efficient in the corporate environment where you have a copy of the pc software load on the network drives for an easy download.

I remember everything PC related, slowed down remarkably when we moved from DOS to Windows. DOS allowed everything to run really fast. Painting all of that GUI crap on the screen took all kinds of resources.

I still respect the throughput that can be attained with an IBM PC with Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect 5.1.

How well we got along without the "Blue screen of death" or GPFs (general protection faults). I remember running Autocad 2.52 on a 4.77mhz IBM PC.

The Apple Mac users are rolling on the floor laughing at PC users. I've worked both sides and the Mac is five to 100 times easier to setup, troubleshoot, and use.

I've worked in companies where every other desk had PCs or Macs. Both boxes shared the same network printers and email programs. I used to do follow through in the morning after the night crew had just upgraded a bunch of PCs and Macs. The Mac users would continue typing and greet me good morning.

The PC users would say, "Are we glad to see YOU". Some say the legs on the Mac are short. I worked where they had 20 platforms of various mid-range and mainframe computer systems that the PC and Mac users had to connect to. The Mac and the connectivity software written for it was always much easier to connect to those other systems than with the PC.

But I have to be honest with people when they want to buy a computer for the first time. I ask them if they were to move to a new planet, do they want to learn the language used by 5% of the population or 95%.

Keith, email address supplied

Letter Two
Dear Mike,

I agree you should try Linux for the fun of it(there are alot of neat features, and if you like Unix you will feel at home). Plus it is nice to see other alternatives, it gets old using the same OS. But with that said, in my experience I prefer Windows over Linux.

I feel rather silly defending Microsoft, since they seem so big and seem to need little defending, but I find it annoying how people have so much hatred for the company. It is almost like these people's religion that have no religion(I assume these people don't really practice religion, but that maybe a bad assumption). I have never seen such an irrational hatred for a compnay in my life.

What these people don't seem to understand is that many corporations act as underhandedly as Microsoft does, Microsoft just does "it" more successfully than the others.

What's really pathetic is the Microsoft case to break them up. Now that the chances are next to slim that anything really detrimental will happen to the company, the companies effectively have made Microsoft stronger.

Now the legal precedence is in Microsoft's favor in any case similar in nature to this. And companies like Sun wasted time and money on legal garbage when they could have been working on better products to combat Microsoft. Thanks to these companies, the politicians are going to have there hand in more and more of the industry which will potentially greatly restrict its freedom.

Case in point where a potenital monopoly could fall is the AMD vs. Intel contest. Anyone who is aware of the situation knows that Intel is virtually a monopoly, whether for good or bad. Now no one really knows the fate between the two, but if AMD is able to deliver on its promises (i. e. Hammer), they will give Intel a run for their money no doubt (that is assuming they deliver of course). This could turn into an example of how the Free Market works. Whatever happened to having a little faith?

I could argue about nuances with the anti-Microsoft people of why Microsoft is as successfully as they are, but to do it in detail wouldn't really be much of good, regarding the extent to how far these people believe that Microsoft is evil. Until the Hardware market matures more (the way this is meant, it won't be for a while), Microsoft will probably be the dominant player in the mainstream market. Microsoft does a good job of supporting software/games, hardware, and a descent interface. Many of there products are good, maybe not the best in the world, but pretty good. These are the general reasons why Microsoft is on top.

There will be bigger answers to Microsoft in the future, as people become more comfortable with computers and as the hardware industry matures. Until that day comes, though, Microsoft has positioned itself to make the PC develop more on a hardware level and give more features to the average user. One can argue that they didn't get to where they were "fairly", which is partially true, but not near to the extent as the detractors like to make them out to be. Until the bigger answers come, they can whine and yell until they are blue in the face, but Microsoft is here to stay, whether they like it or not.

OK, this is more of a rant, but i feel compelled after constantly reading all of the anit-MS rubbish out there. Doesn't DeBeers or some diamond company have a complete monopoly in the diamond market, and that is the reason why diamonds are expensive, not because diamonds are rare in reality? Anyhow, it makes me rather upset to hear especially by the fact that I might marry someday and pay thousands for something not worth that much. I assume that all the married women in the west wear diamond rings, I know this in not true in Asia, as I have been to Japan. It's true in the U.S., and the sheer number of women wearing diamond rings shows you they aren't that rare.

Matt Strobel
Email address supplied

Letter Three: Retail Miseries
Retail Miseries
After reading McFeelme Johnson's harrowing experience at the computer store, I feel the need to share my experiences.

I actually worked at a national chain (best left nameless here, lest they seek revenge) from summer 1999 to the start of 2001. Of course, that time period spans the decline of the tech sector, but it also spanned a period of change for the national chains. I worked at the counter which guarded all the small, expensive goodies (hard drives, memory, expensive software suites, etc.), so most of the "my first computer" customers had no business with me. However, the laptops were stocked behind the counter (they're small and expensive, after all), so I did have to deal with some of them.

When I started there, all the cash registers were monochrome text-mode dumb terminals to a server in the building. They served as both cash registers and lookup terminals (so if I entered a misprinted SKU that turned up a $5,000 price, I could quickly search for the correct SKU by product name). There were a few more terminals spread on the floor so the sales employees could perform lookups for their customers. I wasn't much of a salesman (I'm known to be too honest at times), but I knew quite a bit about consumer-level hardware, so I'd spend most of my time helping people interested in upgrades or just spinning in to buy that one critical component and head off happy. Times were good like this up until 2000 began to approach.

I remember the first time I saw those IBM point of sale terminals. They had a 2x20 dot-matrix flourescent display (something the terminals didn't have), and a 15-inch monitor showing an 800x600 screen split vertically in half. The left side held an on-screen printout of the current tally (mandated by a new town law stating that all retail stores should have a running list of items rung up, displayed plainly for the customer to see). The right side held a huge advertising banner which would flash store products and services.

However, the terminal's monitor would not reflect what the cashier was typing in; that was the 2x20 display's job. It became very annoying when trying to enter customer information for a computer system purchase, since we'd have to feed through each field one-by-one, instead of seeing it all printed at the top-left of the screen. Also, serial numbers could no longer be scanned in with the handheld scanner; they had to be TYPED in; this added at least a minute to the checkout time. The keyboard had a slow acceptance rate, the fast thermal printer was held back by the slow point of sale program, and there was no name search feature, forcing the cashier to either turn away to a monochrome terminal or send out a fellow employee to find the real SKU.

But the worst shortfall: only two forms of tender could be accepted in one purchase (we never ran into a limit with the terminals from what I recall). This was a major problem during the Christmas season, and was highlighted by a man who brought four fixed-value Toshiba gift cards ($50 each, IIRC). These four cards had to be conglomerated into one "gift certificate", which was added to the original transaction with the customer's payment; this required four separate transactions (three at the customer service desk), and resulted in a half-hour checkout time and a disgruntled customer. It appeared to me that these new point of sale terminals were causing more harm than good, but management was convinced otherwise.

The heart of each new terminal system was pretty scary, too. One day I finally saw one of them freeze up, and I discovered the truth. Each one was a K6-2 350MHz computer with 64MB of RAM, running Windows NT4 Service Pack 4 (not 6a, not even 6). The point of sale program was an application running in JGUI (would that make it an applet, then?).

Remembering my previous experiences with client-side Java programs, I became even more disgusted. When one of the monochrome terminals stopped working correctly, we'd call up the login prompt, log back in, and be running in less than a minute. What if one of these things froze? Indeed, they did a few times (not very often, but still more than the monochrome terminals). I longed for the old days deemed unprofitable by the higher-ups.

It wasn't just the checkout registers that changed, it was the entire mentality of the store. Much more attention was paid to selling systems with replacement plans, warranty plans on hardware, and other various pieces of cardboard with stickers showing a price greater than $30. Educating a consumer to the truth was frowned upon, since it meant a lost sales opportunity. In effect they wanted to force us all to become better salespeople, but that was against my honest nature. I held on as best I could, and I did that for an entire year.

The year 2000 in itself was a farce, especially after May when the zany bust products started appearing each month. First it was the CyberGenie by Cygnion. I was actually recruited over the phone by an undercover Cygnion employee when I demonstated that I knew a bit about it, but when it was clear that the product just wasn't selling, I e-mailed my "resignation" (all they did was ship me bundles of pamphlets and a salesman's cheat sheet anyway). Later on the entire I-Opener fiasco started; after two months of no sales, the price was elevated to over $250 to stave off the Linux users who caught on later in the year and started asking for the product.

There was also the Cybiko, which was a $100 pubescent PDA (it had to go behind the counter, and so it didn't receive much attention and didn't sell well), but the worst flop was a cardboard display with over a hundred packages of those "anti-radiation" stick-ons. They were at least $30 a package (up to $100 for the jumbo pack with eight large stick-ons), and not a single one sold; the cardboard display collapsed over time behind the counter, and was eventually shunned to the storeroom behind the counter, unable to be returned to vendor (gee, I wonder why).

I muddled through the torture of the Christmas 2000 season, and sent in my two weeks notice so I could get a work-study position at my college (a bit less commuting involved, since I went there every weekday anyway). The management noticed my waning enthusiasm, and so I spent a few days as an extra cashier and even a greeter (on one greeting occasion a cheap Aibo rip-off toy was put in the entrance lobby for the greeter to operate and entice the children; I wasn't enthusiastic about playing with child's toys, and received some criticism from a manager).

I did my job to help the customers find what they were looking for, and to save some money in the process, but apparently the slick salesman was valued much more than I was. I recently paid a visit to the store back in May 2002, and it was nothing like my workplace of old. The counter I worked at was gone; in its place was a huge wall of shelves carrying drives, motherboards, and cases. There was an island counter selling digital cameras and PDAs amid promotional advertisement posters. The salesmen in the computer system section were walking around, looking for that replacement plan package that they just had to promote and sell to their customer. No one came up to offer me help as I was wandering around the hardware section of the store, and I could recognize no employees; even the management had changed completely from the regime I knew so well.

I had changed, too; seven of my last nine hardware purchases had been made online, and the two store visits were to other chains. I've also toned down my upgrading urge (partly out of necessity; it's not easy being in college without a job), and I'm beginning to turn to other hobbies.

Email name, address supplied